Customer Reviews

Mastering OpenLDAP: Configuring, Securing and Integrating Directory Services

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an extraordinarily well written book. In the preface the author promises to prepare system administrators or software developers for building a directory using OpenLDAP using a practical approach, discussing theory where that helps answer practical questions.

Along with some of the best illustrations of the theory and practice of LDAP directory management, this book contains a wealth of detailed information on the servers, clients and utilities that make up the OpenLDAP suite of software. The examples provided of different configurations are not only detailed, they also methodically build upon each other in a way that really illuminates various concepts far better than I think has been done before.

The appendices in this volume are also worthy of mention: "Building OpenLDAP from Source", "LDAP URLs", and "Useful LDAP Commands" -- the last deftly handling one of my favorite pastimes, "Rebuilding a Database (BDB, HDB)".

This book would be an excellent textbook for use by students learning Internet technologies. It would also make a terrific technical manual for system administrators or developers involved in deploying or maintaining systems and applications that use directory services. Finally, it's the one essential book that all directory administrators should have on their own personal bookshelf.

This is an excellent book if you are interested in learning the theory behind OpenLDAP. However if you are looking for a more practical guide I would suggest looking elsewhere. Aside from the differences in Linux distributions, I have found several frustrating omissions and errors that have cost me hours of research online. For example, chapter three beautifully details how to create an LDIF file, however then fails to explain where to place that file on the file system or how to load the contents of that file into the database. These questions are answered, but a dozen pages later as part of a discussion on a different topic. This made it impossible to find that info when I needed it. In Chapter four, options that should go in ldap.conf are listed as going into slapd.conf. Also the file names cacert.pem and newcert.pem are used interchangeably with no explanation, which can be confusing. Chapter four also fails to mention the openssl-perl module must be installed for the authors directions to even work in the first place. I have not gotten much farther into the text then chapter four and perhaps I'm too much of a Linux novice, but I have been disappointed by this book.

Mastering OpenLDAP covers all technical aspects of OpenLDAP: from installation to running multiple directories in an enterprise. I thought the best part of the book was the detailed coverage given to Overlays and the Schema. After reading about these topics, you'll be able to enable several advanced OpenLDAP configurations such as Password Policies and Referential Integrity.

If you're new to OpenLDAP and need a solid technical book, I recommend Mastering OpenLDAP. Or even if you're familiar with the basics of OpenLDAP and need to learn about advanced topics such as overlays, editing the schema, and configuring replications, this is still a very valuable book.

The concepts and the theory in this book are really good.

As stated in the book, the author installed openldap in ubuntu but the documentation and implementation do not work if you try to install it in ubuntu 8.. I found the documentation in Ubuntu community easier to follow and worked in a matter of minutes for basic authentication in openldap and phpmyldapadmin.

To be practical such as being able to actually run the server and utilities in a real environment, more details (or corrections) would be required.

1. slapd.conf is depreciated since OpenLDAP 2.3 (target version of this book), but the current LDIF format configuration is not described.

2. Dynamic module load configurations are specified in slapd.conf but they are only effective when --enable-modules has been specified to the configure script.

3. Base DN access configuration is missing in the slapd.conf in the book. It can (or will) cause an error to run ldapsearch examples described in the book.

4. Subschema and how to view it is described, but the access configuration to dn="cn=shbschema" looks not described.

etc etc.

Aside from these detail technicalities, very good as an introduction to LDAP.

This is a very well written technical book and it is well organized. The author does a great job of emphasizing important concepts and explains details that others authors sometimes leave out like the differences between Apache 2.0 and 2.2 configuration options. I also found the tips very helpful.

I am a careful reader and really appreciated the attention to details. I found that I was able to follow the concepts at every step but, in some cases, I had to go over the material carefully. If you prefer to skim books your mileage may vary

The content was especially relevant to me because I am using OpenLDAP on Ubuntu with phpLDAPadmin. However, even if you are not using Ubuntu or Debian, you will still find this book invaluable. It covers all of the important concepts and describes the flows needed to put them to work. Most folks can figure out that they need to replace 'apt-get install ...' with 'yum install' so this will not be a handicap if you are using other distributions like Fedora, CentOS, Redhat or SUSE.

I only found two mistakes. Both were minor PHP syntax errors. The first was on page 408 where the statement "'Last Name' = 'Butcher'" in the first example should have been "'Last Name' => 'Butcher'" and the second was on page 410 in the example second up from the bottom where there is an extra parenthesis, the statement "(,array('dc=example.com...'" should be ",array('dc=example.com...'"

Some of the highlights for me were how to synchronize multiple directories (Chapter 7) and how to configure phpLDAPadmin (Chapter 8).

If you are a newbie be prepared for chapters 3 and 4. They are very long but the material is well organized and important.

I strongly recommend this book for anyone involved in LDAP administration on a linux system.

I am rating this book five stars because this book delivers exactly what is promised.

I have several LDAP books and really enjoyed this one. It has very clear and concise examples and is also a great reference. I recommend it for anyone using OpenLDAP.